Abstract

This thesis examines a work of video documentation made by the author called Suite canadienne (2015). The video documents a series of re-performances of a ballet titled Suite canadienne made in 1957 by Ludmilla Chiriaeff, the founder of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal and the first major, government-supported choreographer in Québec. Part 1 of the thesis situates the original 1957 work in the political, cultural and social context from which it emerged. It shows how the original work positioned itself as an originary work of Québec dance and manifested a “hailing” of the subject, following Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation. The author theorizes this hailing as a mobilization of subjective arrest that posits sovereignty as arrestation-in-movement. Part 2 discusses the technique of re-performance in relation to the political, historical and nomological power of the archive. In this way, the author argues for the uses of re-performance as so many strategies for refusing the proliferation of normative culture within and through the dancing body. The thesis examines the 2015 re-performances through three of their aspects: (1) the undisciplining of the ballet body, (2) the reterritorialization of administrative architectures and (3) the performance of experimental subjectivities. The final section, the “coda,” relates all of these aspects to the notion of “otherwise movements” that perform the normative while simultaneously recasting it, allowing for real deterritorializations and lines of flight.